index.md

---

title: translate
slug: Web/XPath/Functions/translate

---

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The translate function evaluates a string and a set of characters to translate and returns the translated string.

Syntax

translate(string, abc, XYZ)

Arguments

• string

  • : The string to evaluate.

• abc

  • : The string of characters that will be replaced.

• XYZ

  • : The string of characters used for replacement. The first character in XYZ will replace every occurrence of the first character in abc that appears in string.

Returns

The translated string.

Notes

XPath notes that the translate function is not a sufficient solution for case conversion in all languages. A future version of XPath may provide additional functions for case conversion.

However, this is the closest we have at present to a function that can convert a string to uppercase or lowercase.

Example

<xsl:value-of select="translate('The quick brown fox.', 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz', 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ')" />

Output

THE QUICK BROWN FOX.

• If abc is longer than XYZ, then every occurrence of characters in abc that do not have a corresponding character in XYZ will be removed.

Example

<xsl:value-of select="translate('The quick brown fox.', 'brown', 'red')" />

Output

The quick red fox.

• If XYZ contains more characters than abc, the extra characters are ignored.

Defined

XPath 1.0 4.2

Gecko support

Supported.